Principles of Liqueur Making

Introduction

Alcohol

Flavoring

Timing

Sweetening

Standard Procedure

Generic Fruit Liqueur Recipe

Introduction
The general principle of liqueur-making is to take an alcohol base (sometimes called "neutral
spirits") and steep a flavoring in it for a time. Next, filter out any remaining solids, add
sweetening, and age. Finally, bottle and serve. Those steps are the simple skeleton structure of
making a liqueur, but it's the details (just what flavoring; just how long; just what sweetener),
and the variations, that make up the soul of your product. Every recipe is different, and many
have somewhat different procedures, but they each pretty much come down to that. And each
flavor creates its own dynamics over time, so it may take a while to learn how it all goes
together. I, for instance, have not. But I'm getting better.
Anyway, predictably enough, I find experience to be a good teacher. One skill I found
especially hard to acquire, though, was readiness to throw out failures. After having spent
anywhere from a week to four months nursing these liqueurs to completion, I found that I'd
hold on to them for months more (and, more recently, even years) in the desperate hope that
they'd get better with age. They almost never did. I've gotten better about it now, but I
recommend that you throw out a few early batches that just weren't up to snuff, if only to get
used to it. Then, when you make the occasional batch of watery pine sap, you'll find it easier
to just toss it. Either that, or start making friends at a local wine supply store so you can get
your bottles cheap, since you'll be using a lot of them for storage.

Alcohol
So, back to the general principle. "Take an alcohol base and steep a flavoring in it for a time."
That's awfully general. I have found, through a handful of experiments, that a good alcohol
base to use, a true "neutral spirit," is Smirnoff 80-proof (red-label) vodka. You usually want
to use a clear, tasteless alcohol, so your obvious choices are vodka and grain alcohol (grain
alcohol is what we cann 190-proof alcohol; I've heard it called many other things, too). Most

of the recipes I have call for vodka of some sort, and they are balanced in taste for just that
proof of alcohol. Varying that alcohol level will certainly change the recipe, but not
necessarily for the worse. I always tell people to experiment with what they have on hand,
since there is no right or wrong flvor for a liqueur.
Oh, much more detail on just what steeping in alcohol does can be found at the Science
section.
Of the various vodka brands, I have found that the really cheap varieties have a distinctly
bitter and unpleasant taste, which becomes part of the liqueurs. I have likewise found that the
really expensive vodkas are all equally tasteless when put up against heavy hitters like
cranberries or ginger root. Smirnoff has proven to be a consistently good trade-off point
between price and quality. Your other good choice is to take grain alcohol (190-proof or so
pure alcohol) and dilute it down to 80-proof. While this is probably the best choice from an
economic and taste perspective, I'm just too lazy to do it myself. So I pay a premium to have
Smirnoff dilute my alcohol for me. Some recipes call for 100-proof vodka. I always cheat
and use 80-proof, but I expect that Smirnoff 100-proof is appropriate as well.
There are more than a few recipes, though, that call for something more interesting as the
alcohol base. There is an extensive family of flavored-brandy liqueurs, in particular, which
use straight brandy as the base, and call for a wide variety of flavorings. But you can make a
liqueur out of most any alcohol base, including rum, cognac, tequila, or anything else that
might strike your fancy. I understand that steeping flavorings in wine is a popular craft in
France, as well. If you feel the urge, you might want to take any of the vodka-based recipes
you find, and just try substituting in an alcohol of your own choice. But, alas, I can't
recommend any particular brand or variety of other alcohols. I just don't have the experience.
Definitely be thoughtful about substituting alcohols, though. It will change the mixture, and at
the least may require a different sweetening. Rum, being fermented sugar, requires much less
additional sugar than vodka. Cognac, at the other extreme, needs a lot of help. Every alcohol
with a distinct taste of its own is going to alter the balance of the steeping flavors, and you
may need to compensate for that as well, by making small adjustments to the recipes. And
there's always the possibility of mixing alcohol bases. I have one recipe from a friend for
cinnamon liqueur, which calls for two separate batches to be made, one with rum, the other
with cognac, and then has them mixed together. Don't be afraid to experiment yourself; there
is no "right" taste to a liqueur. You're only aim is to make something you, and maybe your
friends, like the taste of. Just don't be afraid to admit defeat if it happens.

Flavoring
So, that takes us up to flavoring selection. Pretty much anything can be steeped in alcohol. I
prefer rich fruit tastes, but I have been known to dabble into roots and spices from time to
time. In fact, my first really great series of failures was with cinnamon. The most common
substances are fruits, spices, roots and beans. In particular, it seems that everyone who makes
liqueur, at some time in their career, makes their own variety of coffee liqueur. I haven't yet,
but my girlfriend has (and her efforts have been greatly lauded by our tasters), so I've at least
been an accomplice.
However, mixing flavorings usually results in much richer tastes. With fruits, adding a little
lemon/lime/orange peel can really liven up an taste. Cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg are also a

great addition in moderation. Over-used, they can become fairly exotic tastes, but I've found
that I'm the only one who really likes them. Alas. I don't have any general rules for what
mixes and what doesn't, since I can't really cook. My gut reaction is that coffee beans should
never be mixed with lime peel, but I could be wrong. It might be wonderful. My only hard
and fast rule is don't serve garlic liqueur to anyone without telling them first.
One good concept to keep in mind while working on liqueurs, especially if you're trying to
make a completely new recipe, is that you're essentially making a dessert. Not that your end
product will be relegated to the role of digestif, but the flavoring mix, the underlying principle
of the taste, is that of a dessert. Thus, cinnamon and nutmeg go with apples; lemon peel (in
lieu of lemon juice) goes with most any berry you can find; coffee needs vanilla. I suppose
even peaches need cream, but I've yet to try that particular cream liqueur (though Vargas and
Gulling has some intriguing recipes), so I'm leery of trying so strange a combination yet. But
peaches work just fine on their own, too. But in essence, you're just coating your flavorings
with sugar, so you should make sure that it's a flavor combination that would work even
without alcohol.
If desserts aren't your bag, you can also look at liqueurs from the perspective of jellies. Again,
the flavor-mixing principles are the same, and even much of the processing is the same. If you
have books on jellies, you can learn a lot about what makes a good fruit liqueur. And you
might be tempted into some more exotic experiments.

Timing
In general, there are three stages to a liqueur. Steeping, filtering, and aging. Some flavors, like
cranberry, need no aging. Some others, like tangerine, need up to three months just aging.
Some flavors, notably almost all the dry spices, roots and beans, and any pre-packaged liqueur
extracts like Royal Piper and Noirot, need almost no steeping. They'll be ready to be
filtered in anything from several hours to a week, but almost never more. I don't have any
good rules about just how much to do each stage for any particular flavor, though. The recipes
I have all specify this information, and I just believe them. I've only invented two recipes all
on my own, pomegranate and kiwi, and I'll cheerfully admit I pulled the times I used out of a
hat. Two weeks seemed reasonable to steep, and four seemed a reasonable aging time. But I
haven't experimented much with changing those values for two reasons - I've had enough
problems with consistency without altering the recipe, and I have a full-time job I find it
advisable to go to occasionally. And besides, if it works, I don't see much reason to go
fiddling with it unnecessarily.
The best rules of thumb I can come up with are:
1. If the liqueur is based on fruit meats, like apples or peaches, steep two weeks to a
month, age a month
2. If the liqueur relies on berries, either steep two weeks to a month and age a month, or
steep three months and age another month.
3. If the liqueur relies on oils, as with citrus peels, steep a month, age three
4. If the liqueur is a whole spice, steep a few days to a week, bottle and serve

5. If the liqueur is a powdered spice, steep a day or two, bottle and serve
6. Artificial flavorings, as a liquid additive, rarely need any steeping or aging
And you know, even as I write those, I can think of plenty of exceptions. If you're making a
recipe up, move slowly. It's a lot easier to steep a liqueur a little extra time than it is to
unsteep it. And look for recipes that work with similar fruits, and try those as a starting point.

Sweetening
Oh, one other point: sweetening. Despite what you may think about how sweet the fruits
you're using are, vodka will completely overpower them with its own inherent bitterness. To
compensate for this, we add a saturated sugar solution to the liqueurs. This syrup serves two
purposes - first, to make the liqueur drinkable by cutting the bitterness, and second to cut the
alcohol down to a reasonable level. At 30-proof, the cranberry liqueur is strong enough. At
70-proof, it would be murder. If you don't sweeten your liqueurs, you'll be making a poorman's approximation of something called an eau de vie, which makes a good cooking
additive, either as a marinade or as part of a sauce. (Remember, if cooking with your liqueurs,
to be sure to cook off all the alcohol or you'll have drunk guests.) If you use a lot of syrup,
you'll be making a crme, which is usually a good dessert drink. I personally prefer to keep
my syrup contents just midway between those extremes.
It's almost impossible to judge beforehand how much syrup to add to a flavoring, since a lot
of the chemicals we taste in the raw fruit break down in the steeping process. And you may
have some illusions to get over about how tasty your flavorings are in the first place. Many
people are surprised to learn that, though raspberries have a strong smell, they have
comparatively little taste beyond it. Try holding your nose when you eat them. If you're
working with a flavoring for the first time, make a number of small batches with different
levels of sweetening first, and then make larger batches of the one that works. And some
recipes add the extra step of "sweeten to taste", which it's hard to guess about if you've never
made it before.
Another approach to determining the correct sweetening is to try mixing your ratios by hand
at the sweetening stage. I found it useful to put two teaspoons of an unsweetened liqueur at a
time into a shot glass, and then to mix some quantity of syrup with it to see how it tastes.
Once you know just what proportion works, then measure your liqueur, and add just that
proportion to the jar, and age. You might, though, also consider putting in not quite as much as
you measured out. If your aging period is more than trivial, your sweetened liqueur might
well change its composition during that phase. What tasted perfect in August might be
completely wrong in October. Since it's a lot easier to add more sugar than to remove what's
already there, estimating low in the early stages gives you more flexibility later on. If it turns
out that you need more sweetener after aging, just toss it in and age again. You might not even
need to age the full period again. Another week may be more than enough time for the
additional sugar to settle down.
Many recipes specify a measurement of "simple syrup" instead of the exact quantities of sugar
and water. The general recipe for simple syrup is, "2 units of sugar bioled in 1 unit of water
yields 2 units of simple syrup." In reality, you usually get more like 2.2 units of simple syrup.
Remember that when considering sweetening. The recipe might really mean, for instance, 1

1/2 cups of syrup, expecting you to throw out the extra 1/8 cup of syrup left over. As always,
experiment.

Standard Procedure
1. Put all flavorings in a jar
2. Add alcohol to jar
3. Seal jar, let steep in a closet
4. Shake or turn jar periodically, to keep flavorings from clumping
5. Strain and filter
6. Add syrup
7. Seal in another jar, age
8. Filter again
9. Bottle and serve
Every recipe is an exception to this rule, naturally.

Generic Fruit Liqueur Recipe

Of course, there's no such thing as a correct recipe, so if you're looking to create a new recipe,
you can easily start with something somewhat close. Recipes are more or less grouped by the
nature of the flesh of the fruit you use, so you will find a fair amount of similarity among
fruits that have similar structure. Peaches, nectarines, plums and kiwi are all a sort of family;
raspberries and blackberries, blueberries and cranberries, and apples and pears each form part
of their own families. So if you know what other fruits your choice is similar to, you have a
starting point.
However, you can always try the generic liqueur recipe. Take your fruit and prepare it
however you want - usually slicing in segments, with or without the pit (if applicable).
Loosely fill a jar with the fruit. Pour in vodka until the jar is filled (the vodka fills the air
space between your fruit, so this won't work well with fruits you need to crush). Toss in the
zest (or thinly pared peel) of a half or a whole lemon. Steep 2-4 weeks, strain and filter. Add
sugar syrup to taste (2 parts sugar to 1 part water), age another 2-4 weeks. A fair starting
point for sugar syrup is one unit of syrup for every three units of total liqueur after
straining/filtering.
At that point, taste, and decide if anything is missing. You can always toss in a few more
ingredients and steep them for another one or two weeks to see if you can get the taste just

right. Remember that more than anything else, liqueur-making resembles dessert making. If
you can think of what kind of dessert you would make with a substance, and what kinds of
herbs, spices and flavorings you would use with it, consider tossing them in your liqueur.
For fruits that don't pack loosely into a jar (crushed berries, for instance), a reasonable first
stab is to measure the volume of your fruit, and add to it twice as much vodka as you have
fruit. Proceed as above.

The Science of Liqueur Making

There are two principle kinds of liqueurs - infusions and distillations. My site is all about
infusions, so I'm not going to delve into the realm of distillation (not least because I have no
experience, and no legal way of obtaining it). As you will have seen in the previous section,
infusion liqueurs are made by soaking a flavoring substance in alcohol for a period of time
until you have drawn the flavors out of it. Then you filter out your flavorings and are left
with a tasty drink. But the question may occur to you, why does this work, and why is alcohol
so much better at this than just soaking things in water?
The short answer is osmosis. Osmosis is the technical name for water passing through a
membrane that is fine enough that water can pass through, but larger chemicals cannot. Water,
of course, is a tiny molecule, smaller even than oxygen or nitrogen. So a very fine membrane
can easily block the passage of large things, like sugar, salt, alcohol and children, but still
allow water to pass through. That principle, in fact, is what a lot of our own bodily chemistry
relies on to function properly.
So let's look at a raspberry. Inside you've got raspberry juice, which is water and sugar
mostly. Outside you've got alcohol and water. Once you've got a liquid inside and outside,
the skin will act like a membrane. The water inside is free to move across that membrane, but
once it passes into the side that has less water, it is more likely to stay there. Your alcohol is
concentrated higher than the sugar inside the berry, so over time, the water tends to move to
the side that has the alcohol. The same process works with higher concentrations of sugar and
salt, too. That's why salt shrivels things - the water passes out of the food and into the salt,
and there it tends to stay. Alcohol, sugar and salt are each good at dehydrating things - and
osmosis is why. That's also why your hands look the way they do after a bath - the water
tends to move from the pure water on the outside into the skin of your hands. That wrinkled
look is actually just too much water in the skin surface cells.
So what happens in liqueurs is that every exposed surface on your flavorings behaves like a
membrane. Everywhere that your fruit touches alcohol, you have a membrane. And over
time, the water moves out of the fruit and into the alcohol. That's one reason we tend to chop
things up or poke holes in them - to give the alcohol a larger surface to work on.
But in the real world, no membrane is perfect. Occasionally, things much bigger than water
find their way through. Whichever way the water is moving, the larger things move, too. So

while your alcohol is stealing the water out of your raspberries, some large chemicals, like
sugars, flavors and colors come along for the ride. So over the period of a few weeks to a few
months, the alcohol has robbed your berries of all sorts of tasty morsels. Squeeze the
remaining juice out of your berries and throw away the solids, and your alcohol has a nice
raspberry flavor now.
However, you might wonder now why we go to all this trouble for things like raspberries,
when we could just crush them to steal all the water out of them. The answer to that is that
there's more to the skin than just a membrane. While we're stealing the water, sugar, color
and flavor out of the inside of the berries, we're also stealing complex chemicals right out of
the skin. For me, this was most dramatically illustrated by pomegranate liqueur. When we
were developing this recipe, we tried just crushing the juice out of the seed-sacs adding just
the juice to the alcohol. We also tried crushing the seed-sacs and adding both the juice and the
sac pulp to the alcohol. The result was striking. Without the pulp, the liqueur was bland and
even insipid. With the pulp, it was delicious, subtle and complex. The entire difference was in
the chemicals that came out of the seed-sac membrane, and the seeds themselves. I expect the
most important of those chemicals was tannin - the thing that gives tea and wine their special
feel. It occurs naturally in many fruit skins, and adds so much to the flavor that you simply
can't live without it. Wine-makers even add it to wines that just aren't quite up to par.
So that's why alcohol works at making liqueurs, and water doesn't. In fact, most all the
essential oils and extracts you find in grocery stores are made the same way. Take your
flavoring, soak it in pure alcohol until you've got all the good bits out of it, and then evaporate
the alcohol, so all you have left are the good bits. If you're paying atention, you may realize
another perfectly good way to make something like a liqueur - pack your flavorings in sugar
instead of alcohol. That lets the sugar exert the force of osmosis on your berries instead of
alcohol. The final result will be the same if you eventually add alcohol to the mix. In fact, I
have a cherry liqueur recipe or two that does more or less precisely that.

Tools and Materials

in Liqueur-Making
At its simplest, liqueur-making involves fairly few tools: a jar to steep and/or age in, a funnel,
a filter or two, and a sauce-pan to boil sugar and water together. But I quickly found that I
wanted more specific tools, and a wider variety of options in my preparations.
The most important part of liqueur-making is the glass jar. I use these jars for steeping, aging
and for filtering back and forth. They make the perfect container for every stage of the
process. From the beginning I've been using latched jars like these, primarily because Meilach
and Meilach recommended it. These jars come in many shapes and sizes - pictured here is a
square 1.5 liter jar from Fidenza of Italy. The rubber ring you see is supposed to be replaced
and destroyed after one use, but thankfully they are a standard size and shape, so you can buy
a stash of them and use them on every jar you own.

After a few years of small batches, I decided I wanted to make liqueurs in

somewhat larger volume than I had been, so I went down to my local beermaking store and picked up this fine 5-gallon carboy (shown here 3/4 full of
steeping cranberry liqueur). I use it for cranberry production, mostly because I
make more cranberry liqueur than anything else. But I don't think I'd have any
troubles doing some other flavors in it. The only limitation is that the neck is
only about an inch in diameter, making getting things out of the carboy
somewhat difficult, so I couldn't do things like nectarine or apple. And since I
only have one carboy, I can only age in it if I don't make anything else at that
time. One important consideration before using the carboy is the array of items needed to
support large-scale operations - basically big buckets and nylon mesh bags. To work with four
or five gallons at a time requires that you have a complete set of tools of a large enough scale.
If you're going to work with carboy-sized batches, make sure you also get a food-grade 6gallon bucket with a spigot, and a large sparging bag (which will take the place of the cheesecloth for the first filtration).
The next item I have to show is a wonderful little device used for washing bottles. Basically,
you screw it on to your kitchen faucet, and turn the water on. There's a thin metal rod which
wraps around the outside, and extends inside the tip of the main tube. When there's water
pressure, the rod is pushed out, which closes off the tube. Put the bottle over the end and
press down on the rod where it bends off to the side, and you push the rod back into the tube,
releasing the water. Since the end of the tube is much smaller than your faucet, you get a
high-pressure stream of hot water, which scours your bottles out for you. You can also use it
for jars and the like, or just to squirt water at your
significant other.

Filtration Techniques in
Liqueur-Making
Strangely enough, one of the real problem areas I've run into in the mechanics of liqueur
making is finding a good, general filtration system. Most of the fruits you'll use will break
down a little over the course of steeping, and render themselves partly into a fine mist or
paste. It's surprisingly hard to get this material out of the liqueur before bottling, and the
consequences of not getting rid of it can be interesting. I've had my nectarine liqueur turn to
jelly after a year or two, and I blame it on filtration.
The filtration problem isn't much of a problem if you just let all your "sludge" settle to the
bottom of your jar, and siphon off the clear liquid from the top. This process is called
"racking" in wine-making, and you'll find that wine recipes call for several rounds of racking
your wine off the lees (things left behind). You wind up throwing away a small part of your
batch, enough to hold the sludge at the bottom, but often it's a worthwhile tradeoff. The
problem with racking your liqueur is the time involved, which can be quite long to get the
solids to collect at the bottom. You could also just not squeeze your fruits (or squeeze them
less than you otherwise could) when straining them, and have fewer solids to deal with that
way. I've resorted to that occasionally with the nectarine. But for many flavors, I want to
maximize my yield as best I can, and that means fighting with filters.

The Meilach book recommends initially starting out with coffee filters to remove remaining
solids, and in the beginning I did that for a few months. But it requires amazing patience, and
a lot of coffee filters. The particles of fruit block up the holes in the filters very quickly, so in
short order the filters are completely clogged, and you have to put in another. It became clear
to me that coffee filters were too fine a mesh to use for first-level filtration. Since those early
days, I have started using paper towels as primary filters. They're much more porous than
coffee filters, and consequently let a lot more solid material pass, but I hand-wave that
problem away by reminding myself that the bottles will usually be consumed long before I
have any problems.
The first indication that you have suspended solids in your bottled liqueurs is usually an
unsightly ring about the meniscus (the little upward bend in the liquid level at the top of the
bottle, where the liquid touches the glass). That ring around the inside of the neck is a result
of solids which are lighter than the liqueur, and float to the top slowly. After a few months,
they will have settled at the the top, around the outside of the liquid. And actually, that ring is
usually nothing to worry about, only an aesthetic concern. But all the solids settling instead to
the bottom, or remaining suspended in the middle, might cause troubles of a more serious
nature, affecting the texture or flavor by their mere presence, or decomposing with time into
other unwanted flavors.
Filtration usually comes in three distinct phases

Straining the solid fruits out after steeping, using cheese-cloth or nylon bags

Filtering before aging, using paper towels and coffee filters

Filtering after aging, using more paper towels and coffee filters

The first two phases are usually done together, but it's worth considering them as separate
operations, since the procedures and intent are very different. The purpose of straining is to
simply remove the pieces of fruit and anything else large enough to be easily seen. More often
than not, the point is also to squeeze as much additional juice from the solid fruit as possible
before discarding it. The filtration phase, on the other hand, is expressly to remove fine
particulate suspensions, called mist (no jokes from the Germans, please), and any larger
particles that sneaked through the straining, from the liqueur.
The initial straining process can impact the later filtration stages to a certain extent. The finer
a straining material you use, the less work your filters will have to do. I've found that a finemesh nylon bag can hold back a lot more macroscopic solids than cheese-cloth, probably
because the cheese cloth weave stretches and deforms more under pressure. I expect that
using woven cloth like linen, canvas or cotton would be a fine filtration, since it's a strong
material and a tight weave, but I've never gotten around to using them myself. You may find
that straining once under pressure (to squeeze the juice out of the fruit) and then again without
pressure (pouring through a jelly bag, for instance), to pick up some of the particles that got
through the first time, is worth the effort. Even a coarse-mesh nylon bag, used repeatedly, can
easily remove all the large particles, so that you don't have to deal with them in the next pass.
The filtration-before-aging phase may not need to be as rigorous as the later filtration. I've
found that a small amount of solids held in suspension during aging doesn't seem to harm the
taste any. At this stage, I'll usually run through paper towels once (which may require a lot of

paper towels, depending on the flavor), add the sugar, and seal the jar back up. There will
doubtlessly be a noticeable cloud of solids in the jar, but since the jar will then be sitting still
for a month or more, these solids will all fall to the bottom. This fact can help the final stage.
The post-aging filtration probably needs to be the most rigorous, unless you're lazy like me
and don't care enough. Here is where the final consumers will see the result of your efforts,
either in dense clouds at the bottom of the bottle, in rings at the top, or in the absence of these
blemishes. Both are mighty unsightly, and anyone who drinks the dregs at the bottom will be
unhappy.
So there are two things you can do here. One is to get a length of clear plastic hose (fish tank
air hose works, as does tubing used in beer- or wine-making) and rack off (siphon) the
unclouded liquid from the top; and the second is just filter through a series of finer filters until
you've got all the solids out. I find that siphoning off the unclouded liquid first is useful if
you've got a lot of heavy clouding (like with nectarines or pomegranates), where the amount
of work to filter it out is daunting. It helps if you make large batches of the fruits that cloud
like this, so you can ensure that you've got a good yield even if you have to throw away a lot
of the clouded material.
But if you want to try to keep the extra liquid and separate it from the heavy clouding, then
you'll need to run it through a battery of filters anyway. And if your clouding is light and
distributed fairly evenly in the jar, then you have no choice. Until recently, the only two
substances I'd found that were good for filtering were coffee filters and paper towels. These
can be thought of as "fine" and "medium" filters. The "coarse" filters are things like jelly-bags
and other nylon mesh bags. If thery're too coarse, multiple applications can help.
And that's actually an important lesson to remember. Passing the liqueur through the same
grade of filter a few times is worth the effort. I've taken, when I have the time, to passing
through paper towels twice with every batch, and I've found the results to be significantly
better than just going once. And after passing through paper towels twice, the liqueur can go
much faster through the coffee filters, allowing those filters to concentrate on the finer
particles that the paper towels could never have caught.
Recently I started reading about wine-making, and discovered a whole world of industrialstrength positive-pressure filtration systems. The one I am most likely to acquire some day is
the $85 Vinamat, a hand-pumped two-plate system, with a three-gallon capacity. These pumpfilters use eight-inch-diameter filter pads which are about an eighth of an inch thick. They are
as fine or finer than coffee filters, and work much faster. I'm not sure I will ever make the
investment, though - I've found that I'm not so lazy that it's a problem with my liqueurs, and
until I've got a good reason, in the form of an insoluble filtration problem, I'll probably never
get around to it.
Be careful when using wine-specific filtration systems, though. They are designed to remove
really small particles, and if you just dump liqueur which has only been through cheese cloth
into it, you'll choke your pads very quickly. The pads run about three dollars a pair, and if you
have to use more than one set per batch, then you're wasting money. So run the liqueur
through coarse and medium filters a few times before sending them through your Vinamat or
Polyrad. It'll be worth the effort.

On the other hand, don't use the absolute finest filters available for wine. Much of the flavor
of some liqueurs is in extremely small suspended particles that aren't removed by coffee
filters. There are wine filters fine enough to trap single-celled organisms, and those will
completely denude your liqueur of its taste and body. Wine has to be extremely clear, but
liqueurs don't. And often they aren't. Consider the difference between apple juice (as an
analog to wine) and apple cider (as an analog to liqueurs).
One final note: early on, in my zeal to get all the juice from a batch of nectarine that I could, I
mashed the fruit through a device my grandfather had given me, which is a conical collander
with a wooden pestle designed specifically for mashing fruit. I rendered all the nectarines into
a fine paste. Sadly, that fine paste suspended all the liquid inside, and I couldn't filter it out at
all. Whenever I tried to apply pressure, all my filters either ruptured or began passing the
solids right through, so I wound up losing most of the batch. I've never mashed my fruits
again.
One good rule of thumb to remember, though, is, "Work with what you've got, and keep your
eyes open." If you don't have a big wine-filtration system, see what you can do with paper
towels and coffee filters. Pay attention to the sorts of results you get, and to how the liqueurs
age. More often than not, you'll find that putting in a little effort in the early stages will yield
all the results you could want, without having to go overboard.

Sweetening Your Liqueurs

The simplest and most common sweetener in homemade liqueurs is a syrup of sugar made
from 2 parts sugar completely dissolved in one part water. In most every book I've run across,
it's the same recipe. But there are alternatives you can use, and they can have dramatic and
unexpected effects on your finished product. Some recipes specify alternative sweetening, like
the Tart Apple recipe I use that specifies that dry sugar be added to the vodka directly. Some
recipes I have mention some of the alternatives as variations on the theme, like brown sugar
instead of white. But in reality, any recipe can use any of the available sweeteners. You'll have
to experiment to determine the right replacement proportion, but it's often worth the effort.
So the first obvious sweetener after sugar is brown sugar. When I first started out, I just
substituted light brown sugar for the same measure of white sugar, and dissolved away. The
results, I thought, were pleasant. What makes brown sugar brown (apologies to people who
already know) is molasses, and that can give the resulting liqueur a heartier and heavier
flavor, even bordering on "smoky." Use your own judgment for what flavors might benefit or
not. The Tart Apple mentioned above actually worked quite well substituting the same
measure of dry brown sugar for the white before steeping. It made for a nice Autumn drink.
Since then, I've been told that one should use less brown sugar than white because of the
molasses, and yet I've also seen the exact opposite. I've also seen variations which use some
measure of white and brown sugar together. And finally, I've always been tempted to just go
over the edge and substitute dark brown sugar, but I expect it would just dominate the taste
instead of bolstering it. But someday, I'll know for myself.

Beyond sugars, though, there is a whole world of natural sweeteners. Honey is one of the
more popular ones, and offers a wide range of subtle variations. A good starting point is
simply substituting the same measure of a generic honey for your sugar syrup, and then vary
to taste. But from there, consider using specific kinds of honey. Orange blossom honey can be
very different from clover, and other flowers each can add their own special character to your
liqueurs. Remember that some liqueurs are made from nothing but flowers, syrup and vodka.
Honey offers a special problem in filtration, however, being prone to leaving very fine mists
at the bottom of your jar. You can try to filter them out using very fine filters, but you may
just find that decanting or racking (siphoning) to be an easier approach. You may lose a few
extra ounces of liqueur, but you'll save yourself a lot of time. I've also heard mead-makers
talking about boiling honey to get the wax to rise to the surface to be skimmed away, so it
won't make trouble for you further down the road. I don't know what the heat would do to the
honey's natural flavor, though.
Beyond these, though, many things could be used to some effect. Corn syrup, natural cane
sugar and such things can all be used. Get weird. Remember, without people dreaming up
weird things to do with normal foods, we wouldn't have cheese or mayonnaise. Or sausage.
Once you've found the taste you like, you may find the level of sweetness to be unpleasant. I
personally prefer my liqueurs not to be too sweet. At the same time, I don't like them too bitter
or dry either, so I'm left with a delicate balancing act trying to find the right taste. The
absolute minimum sweetening for any liqueur is what it takes to mask the vodka. That will
depend entirely on what else is going into the recipe: cranberries could mask cod liver oil
without breaking a sweat, but raspberries need all the help they can get. If you're really
disappointed about the taste of something you've made, take a look at the sweetening ratio
first. Along the way, you may also find that increasing the amount of flavorings per unit of
vodka helps the equation, too. I certainly find that true fairly often.
Once you know how little sweetening it requires, though, then you have to find out how much
you want. I personally would take everything at the minimum, if only I had time to determine
what it was. But most of my friends (the people who drink the majority of what I make) like
things a little sweeter than that. So you need to try to find a happy medium. After a few
iterations of this, you'll probably be saddened to realize that, by and large, you're just
approaching the original recipes again, but for some flavors it's well worth the odyssey. Of
course, no one in their right mind is going to make all these little experiements, but sometimes
you should just try a small batch with a completely off-the-wall sweetening. If it works, use it
as the standard recipe, if it doesn't, no harm done.
So there are some standard formulas you'll want to remember.

For approximately 1 unit of standard sugar syrup: mix 1 unit granulated sugar with 1/2
unit water, heat until it just boils (at which point the sugar will be all dissolved), and
cool.

To substitute brown sugar for granulated sugar: mix 3/4 unit brown sugar with 1/2 unit
granulated sugar for each unit of pure granulated sugar; or substitute pure brown sugar
1 to 1 for granulated white sugar.

To substitute honey for sugar syrup: use 1 to 1-1/4 units honey for each unit of syrup.

To substitute corn syrup for sugar or syrup: 2 units corn syrup equals 1 unit granulated
sugar (I saw it recommended not to use corn syrup to replace more than half the
amount of sugar a recipe calls for).

To substitute maple syrup: 3/4 units maple syrup equals 1 unit granulated sugar.

To substitute molasses: 1 unit molasses equals 3/4 units granulated sugar (should
replace no more than half the sugar in a recipe).

For each of these substitutions, pay attention to the volume of liquid that you're substituting
for. You way want to add water to compensate, or remove some water or alcohol instead, to
preserve the proof and liquid balance. Be willing to experiment.
Finally, a note on that recipe for standard syrup (also called sugar syrup, and simple syrup). It
actually yields about 10% more syrup than you thought you were getting. Thus, 1 cup of
sugar and 1/2 cup of water together yield about 1.1 cups of syrup. Some recipes, when they
say 1 cup of syrup, mean "the 1.1 cups you would get from using the standard recipe." Others
mean precisely, "1 cup of simple syrup, and throw away the excess." But rest assured no
recipe will ever tell you what it was expecting. You have to figure it out. Still, that's part of the
joy of homemade liqueurs - figuring it out yourself. If you have only one shot to make a
liqueur, err on the side of caution, and add extra sweetening as needed later. You can't subtract
sweetening, only add more. And it's always a matter of taste anyway.
Storage, Handling and Spoilage

How Liqueurs Spoil

Corking

Bottles

Handling

Life Expectancy

How Liqueurs Spoil

Perhaps the very first thing you need to understand is that there are really very
few ways your liqueurs can spoil. Remember that alcohol is a very effective
disinfectant. It will kill any stray bacteria or fungi that happen by. That means
that you won't have to worry about strange, poisonous organisms growing in your
liqueurs, or molds developing inside. You may get molds on the outside of your
cork, but that's mostly a cosmetic problem.

Most life-forms can only function at low levels of alcohol. One reason is osmosis, which we
discussed in a previous section. But the big reason is that alcohol is really just poisonous.
Even yeasts, which make alcohol as a product of digesting sugars, can only stand so much.
That's why wine has only so much alcohol in it. When the yeasts stop fermenting the sugars

into alcohol, you're done. To get higher concentrations of alcohol, you need to distill it, which
is beyond the scope of this site. Rest assured that any alcoholic beverage with more than 15%
alcohol is quite safe from biological contamination.
Anyway, you must wonder what, then, does cause liqueurs to spoil. And the answer to that is
air. Or, more specifically, oxygen. Oxidation is the bugaboo of most everything organic, and
it's the main bugaboo of alcohols. Oxidation is the process that turns fruit brown - it breaks
large molecules into smaller ones, complex flavors into simpler ones, good liqueurs into stale,
insipid or even sour ones. And it's something you want to avoid if you can.
When a liqueur spoils due to oxidation, it does what you would expect a fruit to do. It turns
brown, the sugars break down, and many suspended solids stick together and form a clump at
the bottom. Often, the colors and flavors will separate considerably, leaving you with a dark,
cloudy bottom half and a sickly yellow top half. It will never hurt you to open up the bottle
and taste it, but don't expect much. Some fruits rich in pectin may also gel. Sugars may fuse
with other chemicals to produce glycerin, making the liqueur thicker anyway. And the pectin
inside may form isolated clumps of odd, alcoholic jelly floating in your bottle. It happens to
my nectarine after two or three years, though I've never had the guts to taste the jelly. But a
general rule of thumb is that when your liqueurs start to fall apart or change state, its time to
toss them and start fresh.
Corking
As I've said elsewhere, there are plenty of good lessons to be learned from winemaking. But one I didn't mention is corking. Wine is actually even more sensitive
to oxygen than liqueurs, so you can imagine than anything that works for wine
should be fine for liqueurs. So the first piece of advice I can give you is to cork
your liqueurs tightly. Get a corking device, get good quality corks from your local
wine-making store, and either get boring, standard wine bottles or be careful
about the necks of the fancy bottles you do buy. The only way oxygen is getting
into your liqueurs once you've bottled them is through the neck, so be careful
how you treat it. Of course, if you're only going to be storing your liqueurs for as
long as it takes to age and drink them, you can certainly afford to be more lax in
your efforts.

Wine corks are standard-sized, and though they can vary in quality, you should be able to buy
good, supple ones for something around $0.35 apiece. They are well worth the investment.
Most unusual bottles come with brittle, porous, tapered corks. They are pretty much useless
for actually sealing bottles. Beyond the obvious hazards of stiff, brittle and porous material,
the tapering angle is probably the most serious concern. What makes wine corks good is that
they're cylindrical - straight from top to bottom. Compress a cork into the neck of a bottle, and
it's an inch and a half of solid seal, in complete contact with the glass. If there's a bubble, a
warp, or a crease 1/4" down the neck, it's still sealed for the remaining inch. Even if there are
many slight imperfections, as long as they don't form a continuous chain, you're still sealed.
But tapered corks really only grab the neck at a line, or at best a narrow ring. If there's an
imperfection in that narrow band, you're sunk.

As an aside, I occasionally see, and use, "Grolsch"-style bottles - bottles with a rubber ring
and latch much like the jars I use for steeping. Although you might think these would be just
as good as their jars, they seldom seal as tightly as jars. I find they leak - faster than good
corks, slower than bad. They'll last fine for months at a time, but they're no good for serious,
long-term storage.
Bottles
Just as a bad cork can let air slip in and out of your liqueur, so can a bad bottle. If
the bottle has an uneven, misshapen neck, or a crease where the glass-mold
came together, it can make even the finest cork unable to make a good seal. My
greatest problems are with bottles whose necks are simply too large. I have to
use tapered corks as stoppers, and still have to force them far down the neck. In
the end, I advise my tasters to simply drain the bottle as soon as they can. This,
thankfully, is usually not a hardship. I say elsewhere that a pretty bottle can
predispose people to liking is contents, but no bottle is pretty enough to
compensate for a brown, grainy liqueur that has spoiled.

It's worth saying, of course, that any container is fine for short-term storage. If you're bringing
it to a party to be consumed that night, you can pour it in an open-air bucket. But if you want
to store it for two or three years, get the best storage containers you can. I could say it's worth
the investment, but good wine bottles are actually considerably cheaper than fancy bottles. So
think about how the liqueur is going to be treated when you're selecting bottles. I usually go
for a mix of fancy but unreliable bottles and boring but solid ones, with the expectation that
the fancy bottles are going to parties that year, and the boring ones are to be kept in personal
liquor cabinets.
Handling
There's actually not much to say here that isn't already common sense in wine
country. The first, best lesson is how and why to keep your corks moist. Corks,
like anything else, can dry out. When they do, they shrink slightly. But slightly is a
dangerous word when you're talking about slow chemical reactions taking place
over years. If your cork separates slightly from the neck of your bottle as it
shrinks, your liqueur will be dead in no time. So, how do you keep your corks
moist? Well, why are wine bottles always stored on their sides? To keep the liquid
in contact with the cork, and thereby to keep the cork, especially the part closest
to the liquid, plump with moisture, and sealing as well as ever.

The proper way of handling corks, I've been told, is to stand the bottle upright for a few days
to let the pressure equalize a little, and then set the bottle on its side. Leave it there until
you're ready to open it. If you get slight leakage, wipe it off and leave it - it's just the higherpressure environment inside the neck trying to equalize a little more. It'll finish. Actually, my
SO and I joke that we prefer to bottle in a rainstorm - the air pressure is lower then, so we'll
get less leakage in the long run.
Other than cork husbandry, keep your liqueurs in a cool, dark and relatively dry place. Heat
and light can both cause oxidation-like effects even without the air, so if you shelter your

liqueurs you will have them longer. Dryness keeps things like mold and mildew from forming
on the outside of your corks. This may be just unsightly, but that can put a lot of people off
their palates thinking about it. And it's always possible that the mold can degrade the cork
and cause it to fail.
Some people suggest using what are called capsules on the necks of your bottles. These are
wax (or foil) caps that sit on the neck of the bottle. At first, you might think these are great to
keep off the occasional mold spore, and even a way to supplement the effectiveness of corks.
But wax is awfully porous. Porous enough that it won't help at all against oxidation, and over
a few years it won't even keep the molds out. If you want to use wax capsules, put them on
last, right before you present the bottle to its recipients.
Life Expectancy
Now, after all this, I would think you're expecting me to tell you that with proper
handling, you can expect your liqueurs to last for decades. Unfortunately, no. The
longest I've ever had a liqueur last was three years, even with good corking.
Why? Well, you'll remember that much of your liqueur creation, especially
filtration, was done in the presence of open air. That's a lot of oxygen dissolving
into your liqueur. In time, it will kill your liqueur from the inside. And for home
use, it's really impractical to try to work without exposure to air, especially that
dastardly filtration step. Wine makers do much of their work in plastic tubes and
glass carboys. And their filters are often closed pumps. But with liqueurs, the
stuff we're filtering is much larger, and would overwhelm wine-makers' pumps. If I
had to guess, I would say that no home-made liqueur would reasonably last more
than 5 years, even with antioxidants like potassium sorbate added. So all you can
pass down to your grandchildren are the recipes.

I freely admit I may be wrong, and maybe it's all a matter of how good your bottles are, but
my experience hasn't been great for long-term handling. Then again, I am lazy...
My general rule of thumb is: if the bottle is never opened, expect three years out of it. If it's
opened once, or seldomly, expect a year or so. If it's opened lots, expect that you'll finish it
soon anyway. There is so much fresh oxygen hitting it that it will be bad in a couple of
months, so you may as well drink it while you can.
But commercial liqueurs can last considerably longer. They have commercial preservatives
and antioxidants to use. They've got a vested interest in increasing the life expectancy of their
brews, and the financial wherewithal to make it work. So if you're here wondering whether
your 40-year-old Benedictine is still good, I would bet it is. And since you're not going to
poison yourself by trying, I would recommend just opening it up and seeing.
There is a second class of liqueurs that bears some consideration - cream liqueurs and egg
liqueurs. Despite alcohol's great disinfectant properties, every liqueur book I've ever read
cautions people against trying to keep cream or egg liqueurs for more than a few weeks to a
month, and then only in the refrigerator. I'm forced to make the same recommendation. Even
with the alcohol, treat it like fresh milk or fresh eggs. If you would throw out milk that had

been in your fridge for that long, you should throw out your liqueurs. So these should be made
immediately before they are to be consumed. It is perhaps possible to keep cream liqueurs
longer, but in order to experimentally determine how long they can last, I would be required
to, on at least one occasion, consume spoiled cream or egg liqueur. And that I have no strong
urge to do.
Again, commercial liqueurs last considerably longer. Eierlikr and Bailey's Irish Cream both
have much longer shelf life than four weeks. But it is because they know what they're doing
that they can get long shelf lives. As long as we're just puttering in our kitchens, we should be
a good bit more careful.

Lessons Learned From Winemaking

I'm embarrassed to say it took me five years to realize this. What classic beverage involves
sweet fruits, alcohol, and sugar? Not liqueurs, but wine. Compared to wine, liqueurs are just a
flash in the pan, a very recent indulgence in the grand history of alcohols, no more than seven
or eight hundred years old. Wine is older than recorded history, and the techniques people use
in wine-making today aren't a whole lot different from the techniques used in ancient Greece.
We may use bentonite instead of ox blood and egg whites now, but the point is the same, and
it hasn't really changed in three thousand years.
So, recently I started to think about the problems I'd encountered in my liqueurs. Mostly,
they're concentrated around shelf-life. Nothing I make lasts longer then two or three years
before spoiling. The spoilage occurs in a few different ways - some of them just turn rancid,
others turn a sickly yellowish brown, others form small, solid clumps, and just for variety, my
nectarine and strawberry always turn to jelly. It turns out that enology (the science of making
wine) has quite a few lessons to teach about just these sorts of problems.

Pectinase

Fining

Filtration

Sulphite

Why Liqueurs Are Not Wine

Pectinase
Pectinase, diastase and proteinase are all enzymes important to wine-making. Diastase is used
to help ferment things like potatoes, herbs and grains, and proteinase is used to break down
protein "haze." Neither of the latter two really is important to liqueurs that I can tell. The
really interesting one is pectinase. As its name implies, it's an enzyme which breaks down
pectin into insoluble solids that settle down to the bottom of the container. You can then filter

them out or just siphon off the clear liquid from the top, leaving the undesirable precipitates in
a sludge on the bottom. In wine-making, this is called "racking."
Why do I care about pectinase? Well, like I said above, I have problems with my nectarine
turning to jelly. If you've ever made jelly at home (I haven't, but my mother and my girlfriend
do), you'll know that what makes jelly gel is pectin. It's a substance, like gelatin, that forms a
fairly solid, elastic mass when given a chance, and some sugar and energy to work with. It
takes my liqueurs almost two years to form jelly, but they do it like clockwork. A much more
complete and technical description of pectin mechanics and pectinase can be found elsewhere,
and probably even on the net. But the sites I once had linked here have long gone away.
What I hope pectinase will accomplish is the complete removal of pectin from my liqueurs.
Crystallized pectin is too small a molecule to be filtered out effectively, and even worse, it's
partly soluble in water, making it nearly impossible to remove it mechanically. But a little
enzymatic push could clear up all my problems entirely. I have not tried it yet, but the variety
of fermentation environments that it's viable in is heartening. I've had some of it on hand, but
I haven't been working with the right kinds of fruits recently, so the opportunity hasn't
presented itself lately. Eventually, though, I'm sure.

Fining
"Fining" is the name given to the clarification phase of wine making. Basically, wine is
supposed to be very clear, and completely without any suspended particles, so wine makers go
to great lengths to clarify it. They filter their wines carefully using industrial filtration
machines, and they use chemical additives to help precipitate out any suspended solids, no
matter how small. They also let the wines sit still for very long periods of time so they can
"rack" out the solids which have fallen to the bottom (that is, they can siphon off the good
stuff from the top, leaving the bad in a sludge at the bottom of the carboy).
The unobvious part of all this is fining. Most people will realize that careful and patient
filtering will remove a lot of solids, and most people will see that liqueurs which have aged
for many months undisturbed will have a fine mist at the bottom, which they can siphon
around. But fining is a subtle, chemical system. Basically, you add a substance that attracts the
solids and suspended proteins and such together until they form a clump which falls to the
bottom. With some fining agents, this happens electrochemically, with the agent having a
positive charge which attracts negatively charged particles such as grape tannin.
There are a number of different substances one can use, though you're far better off getting
your fining agents from a serious wine-making store. Don't just grab some clay from your
back yard and think you'll do anything but poison yourself. Anyway, there are a number of
commercial brands of fining agents, and I can't pretend I know them all. Right now, I'm
essentially reading from Winemaking, by Anderson and Anderson.
Historically, a wide and unappetizing variety of agents have been used for fining. As with
most French cuisine, I wonder how anyone ever discovered these things. Ox blood, egg
whites, milk casein, air bladders from fish, gelatin from horse hooves, seaweed, clay, and
earth have been used. In fact, almost any protein will work at least somewhat, by binding to
other proteins and forming solid deposits. I don't have any idea how the clays work, but
obviously they do.

In modern enology, there are organic and inorganic fining agents. Many of the commercial
varieties, like Claro K. C. and Sparkolloid, are mixtures of both organic and inorganic
materials. Of the pure inorganic, bentonite is probably the best known. It's an aluminum
silicate clay from Wyoming, which is apparently quite popular among Californian wineries.
There is also a commercial product called PolyClar, which is (for what it's worth)
polyvinylpolypyrrolidone. On the organic side, there is still gelatin, though not from horses
hooves any more, and "isinglass," which is still made from the air bladder of the sturgeon.
Many fining agents need to be filtered out themselves using a fine filter, which may present
more problems. But any good wine-making supply store will be able to tell you a lot more
about these substances.
But enough of what I don't know. What I someday hope to learn is that fining home-made
liqueurs is perfectly viable, and will both clarify and help preserve my hard work. Like
everything on this page, I haven't done it yet, but I expect to some day. Like the pectinase
above, I'd probably toss in the fining agent two weeks before aging is complete, so I could
filter out the fining agents and their precipitates in my normal filtration phase.

Filtration
I used to think I knew everything there was to know about filtration. Well, I used to think I
knew a lot, anyway. All this time I've been using gravity-fed filters like cheese cloth, paper
towels and coffee filters draped over a large funnel. And all this time I've been cursing the
time and ineffectiveness of this process. The problem is that the filters themselves get clogged
quickly. You either have to change your fine filters very often, or you wind up going through a
number of gradated filtration steps to get out finer and finer particles. Usually I give up in
frustration long before I've reached a satisfactory stage.
Well, it turns out that all this time I didn't know about pressure-fed filtration systems common
throughout wine-making. What you have are round industrial filter pads an eighth of an inch
thick (or half a centimeter) and eight inches across (twenty centimeters), through which you
push your substance with either a hand pump or an electric one. It's intended for wine, which
generally has very fine particles, and very few of them, but it can be pressed into the service
of liqueurs, too, no pun intended. Really.
Basically, the pads are about a dollar or two each, and must be used in pairs, so you don't want
to have to do too many runs. You need to filter your materials by hand fairly well first, but
you can have real faith that when they come out of the pump filter, they will be pretty darned
clear. I would expect to filter through the standard cheese cloth and jelly bag once or twice,
and through paper towels twice. That's usually a fast enough process that I won't give up
early. Then, instead of going on to coffee filters as I do occasionally now, dump the lot into
the pump filter and let it run.
However, I'm aware that many liqueurs get their heart and sould from fine suspensions of fruit
material. Using serious filters will be a ginger and cautious process, as one tries to figure out
the proper balance to use between bad suspensions and essential ones. Each liqueur will be
different.

Sulphite

Sulphite is essentially a preservative. You find it used on dried fruits to preserve coloration,
and you find it in wine. Sulphite, which is a short name for both sodium- and potassiummetabisulphite, serves two main functions. First and foremost, it combats oxidation, and
second it inhibits the growth of bacteria (and yeast, so it stops yeast activity). Oxidation is
among the greatest threats to wine. If you don't have your carboys filled right up to the neck,
the extra surface area exposed to that tiny amount of air can ruin the whole batch. If your wine
gets poured through the air without great precaution, the same problem can happen. That's
why so much wine-processing happens in plastic tubes and glass containers. Sulphite is
commonly used in wine because it's a natural by-product of the grapes themselves - sort of a
natural antibiotic.
Liqueurs are very different from wines in this regard, though. While liqueurs are certainly
susceptible to oxidation over long periods of time, air is no immediate threat to them. Most
living organisms aren't any threat either, being unable to survive a 40-proof environment.
Remember, alcohol is fundamentally poisonous. In some sense, liqueurs are their own
preservative. However, there is still something to be said for using sulphite when appropriate.
Sulphite is at the very least a popular sterilization substance. Wine makers routinely wash all
their equipment and especially their carboys and bottles with a moderate sulphite solution. As
I say elsewhere, it never hurts to have really, really clean materials.
Liqueurs are still susceptible to oxidation, but it takes a long time. Oxidation can be thought
of as the process that turns fruit brown. Oxygen helps break the complex sugars and other neat
chemicals down into smaller component parts. Once the skin of a fruit is punctured, oxygen
gets in easily and starts breaking the area surrounding the puncture to brown mush.
Essentially, the same thing is happening in liqueurs. Over time, and especially with bottles
that aren't really air-tight, enough oxygen gets in the bottles to start turning the liqueurs into
brown mush. Now, I'm still researching just what sulphite can and can't do, but I'm hoping it'll
help combat oxidation in the long run. Ascorbic acid has also been suggested as a possible
chemical additive to help combat oxidation.
Anyway, I'm unlikely to use sulphite myself, because I have at least one good friend who's
allergic to it. And I'm really hoping that better bottles and filtration will make oxidation a nonissue for me. But if you suffer from early spoilage, you might well want to look into sulphites
and other natural antioxidants.

Wine Is Not Liqueur

Yes, it's obvious, but why it's obvious may not be. Wine is made by taking a sugary liquid and
fermenting it with the help of some friendly yeasts. A wine is done when the vast majority of
sugar has been converted into alcohol, and you then try to "stabilize" your wine by balancing
the pH and removing the yeasts. The result is usually 7-12% alcohol. Liqueurs on the other
hand present a completely different environment. There is no fermentation at all, and no
yeasts. The resulting product is very high in sugar, very high in alcohol (usually 20%), and
different varieties have wildly different pH. There is no concept of stabilization, really.
Yeast is the most persnickety part of wine. It has to be coddled with the right percent of sugar
in solution and the right temperature and acidity ranges, and it has to be kept well clear of
oxygen. And when the wine is done, you've got to go to some great length to get rid of the
yeasts so they won't make any more trouble. With liqueurs, acidity is completely unimportant,

sugar is added just to taste, air is no immediate threat, and temperature is much more flexible.
Naturally, the cooler the mixture is the longer it has to steep, and it's possible to have it too
warm, but there's nothing that requires you to keep it right at 60, for instance. You just dump
all your stuff together, let it sit for a while, filter it out, sweeten it, age it and bottle.
What does all this mean? Well, first and foremost it means that most of the troubleshooting
advice you'll get from wine-making isn't really applicable. The big problems you encounter in
wine-making involve starting, maintaining and stopping the fermentation. Liqueurs, by
contrast, are amazingly easy, being in a sense just glorified drink mixing. But there are areas
of overlap, like filtration, clarification, bottling and sterilization. I recommend heartily
becoming conversant in wine-making techniques, if for no better reason than being able to
recognize when those techniques will benefit your own efforts, and when they won't.

What are Schnapps and Cordials?

There's some confusion about what schnapps is, what cordials are, and what liqueurs are.
This situation is exascerbated by some benign misuse in the commercial alcohol market, as
well as regional interpretations that can be quite different. So while I can offer some technical
definitions, don't go complaining to your local liquor store that some bottle or other is
mislabeled...
For years I labored under the mistaken impression that "schnapps" was just another synonym
for "liqueur." Indeed, more than once I've been asked what the technical difference between a
schnapps and a liqueur really was, and not only could I not say, I couldn't find any books that
could say, either. Finally, someone came along and gave me the real story. Many thanks to
Albert Grimm for setting me straight.
In his own words, Schnapps, a German word, "is the generic term for all white (clear)
brandies distilled from fermented fruits. True Schnapps has no sugar added and is definitely
an aquired taste, particularly for nationalities not used to raw distillates." So schnappses are
different from liqueurs on two major fronts, they being both fermented and distilled, where
liqueurs are simply fruits steeped in an alcohol which has already been fermented and
distilled. You will also hear the words eau de vie in the context of liqueurs. I believe (though
I'm always happy to be corrected) that this is a French expression for an unsweetened fruit
brandy, very similar in nature to Schnapps. It has come to be used to mean an unsweetened
liqueur as well, probably because of the similarity of taste and texture. But the original
meaning was most likely as a brandy. Anyway, most significantly, this means that the run-ofthe-mill home liqueur maker will never be able to really capture the whole essence of many
commercial schnappses. The chemistry just isn't there.
Now, this doesn't mean that you should throw your hands up and walk away from ever trying
to make a decent copy of a true schnapps. Liqueurs do go a long way towards tasting like real
schnapps, and can make some compelling tastes on their own. One of my original intents in
making liqueurs was to copy peach schnapps. I can't make it perfect, but a simple peach
liqueur with some strategic addition of glycerine can fool all but the most discriminating
palates.

It's worth noting that true German schnapps is not what we get in the United States. The major
American commercial brands are all heavily sweetened, and have added glycerine as well. It's
about as close to true German schnapps perhaps as American beer is to its German
counterparts. If you want to try to capture the taste of a true schnapps, consider making an
eau de vie. Basically, make your liqueur, but ignore the requirements for sugar. Whether to
add the extra water without sugar is your own choice. I recommend experimentation, as
always.
Cordial, on the other hand, has a different meaning depending on where you say it. In the US,
it almost always means a syrupy, sweet alcoholic beverage. In fact, in the US, "liqueur,"
"schnapps" and "cordial" all occupy that nebulous field of flavored hard liquor, with varying
degrees of sweetness. In many other parts of the world, most commonly the British
Commonwealth and her former possessions, cordial actually means a non-alcoholic, sweet,
syrupy drink. One of the most well-known commercial cordials, Cadbury-Schweppes' Rose's
Lime Cordial, is a good example of this confusion. Originating in London, Rose's Lime has
always been called "cordial" among the English. But in North America, it's called Rose's
Lime Juice because consumers, upon reading "cordial," would immediately think "alcoholic."
Unfortunately, we Americans all drink soda (I mean tonic - I mean pop), so there seems to be
very little domestic market for the things the British would call a cordial, except as cocktail
mixers. So if you're looking for recipes for UK-style, non-alcoholic cordials, I definitely don't
have any, but I can't even suggest what a better term to look for them would be.
Bottles and Corks
The first thing I realized about bottles is that, somehow, a visually appealing
container predisposes people to liking the contents. Marketing mavens for years
have understood this principle, but I only truly grasped it when I started bringing
my liqueurs to parties. One look at an unusual or intricate bottle, and people
automatically assumed that what was inside must be precious indeed.

There is, however, a certain trade-off. The pretty and interesting bottles that you can find are,
in general, not as consistently made as more standard bottles. Small irregularities in the
roundness of the neck can prevent you from getting a good seal when you cork the bottles,
and the wide varieties of neck size you get in the first place can make fitting your corks a hard
task indeed. That said, with a little care and hard work, I still find these bottles worth using in
some circumstances.
So the first question is: where might one find these bottles? In the beginning, there was Pier 1.
Actually, there still is Pier 1, but I don't live right up the street from one any more. But back
then, in the early days, I bought all my bottles, and most of my glassware, from the Pier 1 on
Beacon Street in Brookline. They may not be the cheapest, but they had by far the best
selection of exotic bottles and odd-sized mason jars of anywhere I looked. And they were
right up the street.
Truth be told, the very first bottles I used were the old 16 ounce CocaCola glass bottles.
These were the short, stout bottles, not the signature fluted bottles people recognize. I stripped

off the labels, and kept the plastic twist-off caps. They held my first few failures admirably,
but it was immediately obvious to me that I couldn't carry my liqueurs around in such sad
looking containers. I might as well keep them in the mason jars - then at least I'd get the
comedic benefit of looking like a real moonshiner.
So I went off in search of glassware. At Pier 1, I found some wonderful-looking cobalt-blue
bottles imported from Spain. These were actually part of a wider family which, then, included
very-pale, almost clear green, and deep, forest-green glass. The bottles were all molded from
the same patterns: 3 cup square (far left), 1 quart tall and round (near left), 2 1/2 cup round
with grape-leaf decoration (near right), and 2 1/2 cup triangular (far right). They all cost
between $4.00 and $7.00, which, although it made them the most expensive part of my
liqueurs, was easily affordable. Well, affordable for some definition of the word. I've easily
spent thousands of dollars on glassware in the past seven years.
Since I originally found these bottles at Pier 1 (and made good
friends with one of the managers there), I've found them
cropping up most anywhere. Almost every department store
with a housewares section has some offering of fancy bottles,
and places that specialize in kitchenwares are full of them.
Even craft stores have them. Some stores have varieties that can't be found elsewhere (Crate
and Barrel, for instance, has a very small number of designs, but it's the only place you can
get those), and I've found it's always worth investigating whatever store I'm in. Whether or not
I'm in a buying mood that day, it's worth knowing what oddball designs are coming around.
And oddball designs abound. I have bottles shaped like bunches of grapes, fish, and even the
Mayflower (a 17th century sailing ship important to American history). Even the standard
bottles are getting spruced up now, with many finding themselves painted in festive patterns,
or molded with various designs inlaid in the glass. There is probably a bottle design for every
taste, which of course means that most of them won't appeal to any individual person, but the
variety is both fascinating and entertaining. With so many to choose from, you might consider
selecting a particular bottle design for each liqueur you make, making them distinct and
recognizable.
Something you should always have somewhere in your mind when buying bottles is variety of
size. Thankfully, the selections of unusual bottles at every store I go to usually has many
different sizes as well as shapes. Many full-size bottles have miniature (often half- or thirdsize) counterparts, and there is an endless variety of small, one- or two-ounce bottles.
Especially when giving the bottles as gifts, you might consider using such a pretty, little
sample bottle instead of the full quart.
When I've had a fair variety of good liqueurs available, I have been known
to give a half a dozen sample bottles to a friend for some convenient
holiday. Many people appreciate the opportunity to try several flavors
without feeling obligated to drink a gallon of alcohol or more. You can also use the half-sized

bottles to give your liqueurs to people who do not drink much, so that they won't have a large
bottle staring forlornly down at them from their shelf for months on end. And as an added
bonus, smaller bottles give you a way to avoid having to waste liqueurs at the end of a batch.
Half-filling a large bottle is, I've found, a sure way to have the contents go bad. If I find
myself stuck with extra liqueur that isn't enough to fill a bottle, I might be tempted to throw it
out, since it's just going to go to waste anyway. But samples give you a good way to use
nearly every last drop of your creations.
I have found one major problem with a lot of glassware, though. As the
popularity of colored glass has increased, so has the pressure to bring down
prices, at least at the wholesale level. This has resulted in some serious
cheapening of materials and design. Mostly, this is just cosmetic, with
bottles having lists to one side, embedded grains of sand, or other obvious flaws. Usually
these defects aren't serious enough to cause the bottle to fail, but I do check more carefully
than I did in 1991. But one serious thing is that many bottles are just white or pale-green glass
which has been painted the desired color. I haven't heard that the paint is toxic, and I expect it
isn't, but the paint definitely leaches out into the liqueur stored within it. At the very least, it
smells and tastes terrible. I won't use them.
It's getting hard to tell the painted glass from the real dyed glass, though. I first
discovered the painting when I was cleaning a neat little light-purple bottle I had
just been given. I poured boiling water into it, and was hit in the face with a really
foul odor. I put it aside and moved on to other bottles, and didn't return to it until
the next batch. I then looked a lot closer at it, brought my girlfriend in to consult,
and we decided it had to be that the glass was painted. We could see by the differences in
color density that it wasn't dyed glass. We decided to put liqueur in it anyway, just to see if it
affected the taste. It did, and badly at that, so now these bottles hold flowers in the living
room. Actually, the paint is peeling off now, and I'm tempted to help them along with
turpentine and see if the underlying bottle is usable.
With some study, though, it's relatively easy to recognize most of the colors that are
painted. Bright reds, some blues that are too royal, purples, yellows, and really outr
colors are all most likely painted. A few years ago they started putting "Painted Bottles Do Not Machine Wash" stickers on the painted ones, and for a while it was a great help,
but lately the larger chains have gotten lazy, and are putting these stickers on all their
bottles so they don't have to pay attention to which is which any more.
More recently, I've started going to brewer's supply stores, and there I've found what I'm glad
I didn't find seven years ago: regular wine bottles at reasonable prices. They come in colors,
but they're all essentially the same, boring round featureless bottles. But once you've got a
reputation, and people come to respect the contents of the bottles regardless of the bottles
themselves, then these are a good, economic alternative.

The best thing about these wine bottles is that they've all got the same size neck, and they take
standard-size corks. I can't tell you how much time I spend looking for odd-sized corks for all
the fancy bottles I've got. Quality control is something you just don't find in exotic bottles,
and I don't have two bottle-necks alike. At least with real wine bottles, you can buy two dozen
corks to go with a dozen bottles, get a mechanical cork-inserter, and know everything will
work. I use a mechanical cork-inserter when the neck is about the right size, but all too often I
have to resort to pushing the corks in with the palm of my hand, and my hands can get pretty
bruised in the process.
Which brings me to my other point: Corking
Corks, properly and carefully handled, should make an adequate seal for your
bottles for years. Of course, your liqueurs might still self-destruct from within, but
for a reasonable shelf-lifetime, the corks should be a more than sufficient barrier
against the outside world. The problem is that a good cork by itself is not enough.
You need to be careful that your good cork has a good bottle to go with it, to
make a good seal.

I've only been at this hobby for ten years, and I haven't had many good batches that stayed on
the shelf for two or more years until recently. In looking over my bottle rack, I noticed that a
very old bottle of the cranberry liqueur, one of the most popular recipes, had turned. The
liqueur had gone from a rich red color to a sickly yellowish brown, and there were brown
clumps suspended in it. Remembering a few bottles of other varieties that had similarly
turned, I decided that perhaps there was a pattern worth investigating.
Somewhere, somehow, I got a clue. When not sealed well, corks breathe, and they allow for
some evaporation of the alcohol and passage of oxygen. I decided that that's what must be
happening, that my liqueurs are spoiling because they're getting oxygen and losing alcohol.
Originally, I thought that it was the corks themselves that were breathing too much, but after
some more close investigation, it became clear that the corks were leaking - they didn't have a
good seal to begin with.
The problem with the pretty bottles I use is that they're not made terribly well. They hold
liqueur admirably, and don't break or leach strange chemicals, but the problem is likely that
the inside of the necks just aren't made precisely enough. Any little wrinkles in the neck, or
any real deviation from roundness, and the cork just can't fill the whole space. Air, water and
ethanol will move freely in and out of the bottle, and larger objects, too, like maybe bacteria.
My first, easiest approach to this problem was to buy the mechanical corking device I
mentioned before. It basically compresses the cork through a cone, and releases it into the
neck of the bottle. The cork immediately expands back to full size, and presses itself into all
the nooks and crannies of the neck that it can fit. And more importantly, the cork is pressed in
more tightly and securely than I could ever achieve with simple hand-pressure. For the
majority of the bottles I use, this is a definite improvement. There are still quite a few I have
to do by hand, but I can always make sure those get consumed first.

Other Liqueur Resources on the Net

I've been awfully remiss about collecting the sites I have seen, but thankfully, larger (and
higher-profile) liqueurs sites have cropped up, and are largely doing the work of collecting
links for me. But here's a start. And you know, if you want to send me links to include here,
I'm always happy when someone else does my work for me...

Making Liqueurs

LiqueurWeb. An enormous and well-constructed site. Go here first. Links, recipes,

techniques, the works.

Danish Schnapps Recipes. Exactly what it says. Large and informative and fun.

(Un)Official Internet Bartender's Guide. More about cocktails than liqueurs, but
enormous and useful.

Flora's Mixed Drinks & Brewing Recipes. A large collection of mixed drink, liqueur
and brewing recipes.

The Home Brew Shop (UK). They stock equipment, books, liqueur concentrates, and
beer- and wine-making supplies.

How to Make Liqueurs & Cordials at Home, by Lusions Publishing. This is sort of a
preview of the book they also sell here.

Commercial Liqueurs

Yahoo! - Alcoholic Beverages Companies

Tamborine Mountain Distillery - a small, friendly distillery in Australia who care

about the art of distillation and liqueurs.

Cuervo.Com

BECHEROVKA Herbal Liqueur (Carlsbad)

Grand Marnier

Amarula

Bailey's Irish Cream

Campari

Cointreau

DeKuyper

Amaretto Disaronno

Drambuie

Frangelico

Irish Mist

Jagermeister

Kahlua

Midori